The Direction We Forgot

The Vertical We ForgotFor most of my adult life I lived two lives at once. One was a Western life in its successful form, twenty years in corporations and most of the major cities of the world, and I do not look back on it with contempt. I liked it. Underneath it ran a second track the whole time, depth psychology, Jung, the Eastern traditions, meditation.Almost five years ago my wife and I left Europe with our children and moved to Costa Rica. From here the difference is so plain I can no longer unsee it. The modern world has perfected the horizontal axis, everything you can touch, count and set beside your neighbour, and quietly abolished the vertical, your relation to whatever is larger than you. A civilisation can grow unimaginably rich on the one axis while starving on the one it has forgotten.Drawing on the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser, this essay is about that flatness, why the way out is not a return to religion or to the village, and what the Eastern traditions call vivéka, the capacity to tell the real from the unreal.I am Daniel Paulus. I work at the meeting point of Jungian depth psychology and the living Vedic tradition. Different languages, one inner world.Writing and essays: danielpaulus.substack.comIndividual guidance: danielpaulus.net